Every week at placement I have helped out in an assistant coach role at an after school netball club, which is run by the P.E teacher (Mrs. Lowe). As I am there every week working with the same participants, I have got to know them much better than the students in lessons as we have worked with different classes and each class has twice as many pupils as the netball club. For this reason my needs analysis is on the school’s netball team.
The netball team consist of 13 pupils from year 5 and year 6. Of these 13, six are male and seven are female. They play in high-5 netball league with other schools in the surrounding area, playing one or two games every two weeks. During a high-5 game, a maximum of two boys are allowed on court at any one time. Due to the even split of buys and girls in the squad, the team usually has three girls and two boys on court at all times. The games consist of four six minute quarters, with the positions being rotated at the end of each quarter so everyone plays a range of positions during the game. A match squad of seven players is used, meaning two players will be sat out at all times.
Because of the nature of the game (rotating through all positions) all players must possess all skills needed, including offensive and defensive skills. For this reason there are 10 areas I have chosen to analyse, these are; chest pass, bounce pass, overhead pass, footwork & pivoting, attacking movement, attacking pass selection, defensive blocking, defensive intercepting, confidence and motivation.
In the above table; green represents an area the participant strives in, yellow represents an area they have average capabilities in and red represents an area they struggle in.
As shown in the table, there are three main areas that the team as a whole need to work on; footwork & pivoting, defensive blocking and defensive intercepting. These are all areas we have been working on during the sessions and they will continue to work on for the rest of the year. As well as the overall weaknesses, there are 4 main participants who could be seen as strugglers in various areas. Firstly participant 1; whilst he is struggling in defence, he is more of a striver on the offence. The way to combat this is to work the rotations so that whilst he is playing defence, he is partnered with a striver. The other three strugglers (participants 6, 9 and 1o) are all in year 5 and are showing great potential. Mrs. Lowe and I are in agreement that if they continue to show up to the clubbed work on their general game, they could be strivers by next year.
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Nathan Westwell - Coaching Blog 